Keystone PM: @Dermot

Copilot: @Jack

Purpose

One of PNF’s stated Big Hairy Audacious Goals for Pocket is for POKT to have the institutional financial rails expected of a blue-chip token. The volatility and lack of market depth of POKT act as a genuine barrier to entry to new entrants to the ecosystem. And for Pocket’s economy to win, the lifeblood of the economy, POKT, should be as freely accessible as possible for new node runners, gateways, applications, and DAO contributors.

Consequently, we want to develop a “wrapped” version of POKT, “wPOKT,” that can represent the value of native POKT 1:1 and benefit from the smart contract features and tools available within the Ethereum ecosystem.

Objectives

Our aim with wPOKT is twofold:

1. Enable the interoperability of Pocket Network with best-in-class DeFi and DAO tooling and infrastructure
2. Improve liquidity and access to POKT

Achieving these objectives can unlock financial legos, such as streaming payments, DAO budgeting, and other integrations that will help the DAO scale and onboard new contributors. Additionally, wPOKT as a programmatic primitive can be the foundation for more sophisticated Pocket products in the future.

Operating principles

In building wPOKT, we are keen to adhere to the following principles:

• Never let perfect be the enemy of good. This initial version of wPOKT is an MVP: it is more important to ship a working version of wPOKT and its accompanying bridge in the coming months than it is to ship a “perfect” - perhaps “trustless” - version in a year’s time.
• Keep things simple and reduce all unnecessary overhead. The UX should be incredibly straightforward and easy to use as PNF doesn’t have the bandwidth to process refund requests and act as 24/7 customer support for wPOKT.
• User safety is paramount. We must minimise the scope for user mistakes and never sacrifice safety in the desire to ship quickly.
• We cannot slow down any other ecosystem priorities to deliver wPOKT. Consequently, wPOKT cannot include any features that would require a protocol upgrade prior to v1, eg to enable threshold multisig functionality for Pocket’s blockchain (which will be included in v1).

Implementation plan

Success metrics

The north star metric for this project is 2% depth (the amount that can be purchased/sold within 2% of the spot price). As of 19 June 2023, the amount that can be purchased within this range on the largest market for POKT(measured by 24h volume) is $1.9k (albeit the liquidity on Kucoin is much better with a 2% depth of $11k).

For wPOKT to be successful, it is necessary for people to easily be able to buy - and sell wPOKT - and then use that wPOKT as they need, including bridging it over to the Pocket Network blockchain to stake as a node runner, or directly as an application/gateway (post v1).

Technical specifications